Eigenfactor is currently looking into how to incorporate real-time usage data, as well as “citation-like references” from scholars on social networking sites. Shout-outs on scholarly blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, along with digital dog-earing on social bookmarking sites such as CiteULike and Connotea, might also be used as proxies for influence

The article also references research from the MESUR (MEtrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources) project.

Tenure: Mend It, Don't End It Arthur Levine describes some the advantages and - in no uncertain terms - gives his views on the weaknesses of the tenure system.

More often tenure provides a lifetime of job security not to professors whose work requires protection, but to a significant minority of "deadwood" — individuals who are unproductive, out of date, or poor in their research, teaching or institutional commitment.

His suggestion is to have a 30 year contract to limit the length of tenure and thus insure an institution's ability to maintain 'intellectual vitality'.

Paul Wouters - director of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies and professor of Scientometrics at Leiden University - wrote on his blog about this issue:

[...] the reason for this high position is the performance of exactly one (1) academic: Mohamed El Naschie, who published 323 articles in the Elsevier journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractalsof which he is the founding editor.

His article mentions the fact that THE has "outsourced citation analysis to Thomson Reuters"

Monday, November 8, 2010

[...]in business research, [...] an exceedingly interesting battle rages. Only HBS, Darden and Ivey believe in case-based research and create a meaningful number of cases each year. The remaining schools focus primarily, if not exclusively, on what might be called contemporary social sciences research.

The lack of book indexation in WoS has often been cited as leading to an underestimation of an author's impact in his/her field. Google scholar - freely available on the web - has always included citation from books.

Friday, October 8, 2010

In April 2008, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publications sued Georgia State University officials for “systematic, widespread and unauthorized copying and distribution of a vast amount of copyrighted works” . NYT article reporting on lawsuit.

The Judge has granted the defense motion for summary judgment on two of the three claims — direct and vicarious infringement — and denied it in regard to the third claim, which is contributory infringement. The plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment has been denied in its entirety. The net result is that the case will go forward on the single issue of contributory infringement.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

BISG (Book Industry Study Group) launched a study on Consumer attitude towards e-books The reports are not free but results have been reported in a variety of places.

Here are some key findings:

Right now Kindle holds the top spot for devices @ 40% – just passed the PC/laptop in the last survey @39%

Nearly half (49%) of ereading devices continue to be acquired as a gift from someone else

Cost of entry is still the top reason people who read ebooks have not switched to a device.

Among ebook buyer, print is definitely losing ground – nearly 50% of ebook readers now say they are buying exclusively or almost exclusively ebooks/ 49% indicate they either MOSTLY or Exclusively purchase ebooks

38% of those indicating first ebook purchase say they started within the last 6 months.

University of California Libraries entered into an agreement with Springer in September 2009 to run a 2 year pilot project by purchasing "nearly every Springer ebook published in English and German from 2005 to 2009, including Landolt-Bornstein. The collection includes nearly 20,000 ebooks in the sciences and social sciences. "

Each book chapter is available as a PDF file without digital rights management (DRM). These files can be downloaded, printed, and even transferred to a PDA or Kindle. Eventually, these ebooks will be linked from our campus catalogs as well as from Melvyl, UC-eLinks, and Google Scholar.

ORCID, Inc. aims to solve the author/contributor name ambiguity problem in scholarly communications by creating a central registry of unique identifiers for individual researchers and an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID and other current author ID schemes.

Who are these people?

Several organizations have agreed to contribute data sources and technologies to aid the initial development of the ORCID prototype, including: Researcher ID profile system from Thomson Reuters, author profiles from REPEC, Scholars Universe, Scopus, and bibliographic data from the CrossRef metadata database.

Zotero Everywhere will have two main components: a standalone desktop version of Zotero with full integration into a variety of web browsers and a radically expanded application programming interface (API) to provide web and mobile access to Zotero libraries. Zotero is a production of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

The National Research Council released the Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs on September 28, 2010. The report consists of a descriptive volume, and a comprehensive data table in Excel containing data on characteristics and ranges of rankings for over 5000 programs in 62 fields at 212 institutions.